Brain size helps people make friends

1 Feb 2012, 4:34 pm   -   Source: AAP
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Scientists have found a link between brain size and the size of a person's social circle.

Making friends and being popular may boil down to the size of your forebrain, a study suggests.

Scientists found an association between the size of the orbital frontal cortex - the part of the brain just above the eyes - and the number of friends a person has.

The region is one of the most highly evolved areas of the human brain. It is known to be crucial to social skills and the ability to "mentalise", or guess what other people are thinking.

Brain scans revealed that volunteers with the largest numbers of friends also had the largest orbital frontal cortex.

The study confirms the link between "mind-reading" skills and the ability to maintain a circle of socially significant friends, as opposed to acquaintances.

Lead researcher Professor Robin Dunbar, from Oxford University, said: "Mentalising is where one individual is able to follow a natural hierarchy involving other individuals' mind states.

"For example, in the play Othello, Shakespeare manages to keep track of five separate mental states ... Being able to maintain five separate individuals' mental states is the natural upper limit for most adults.

"We found that individuals who had more friends did better on mentalising tasks and had more neural volume in the orbital frontal cortex.

"Understanding this link ... helps us understand the mechanisms that have led to humans developing bigger brains than other primate species.

"Our study finds there is a link between the ability to read how other people think and social network size."

The research, in which 40 volunteers agreed to have magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans, appeared on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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